Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide free download ebook for read
Jooml a! 3 Begi nner's Gui de
A clear, hands-on guide to creating perfect content
managed websites with the free Joomla! CMS Eric TiggelerBIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Jooml a! 3 Begi nner's Gui de
Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: March 2013 Production Reference: 1130313 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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Credi ts Author
Eric Tiggeler Reviewers
Peter Martin Sanjeev Shrestha Acquisition Editor
Robin de Jongh Lead Technical Editor
Mayur Hule Technical Editors
Dominic Pereira Dennis John Project Coordinator
Anish Ramchandani Proofreader
Katherine Tarr Indexer
Tejal R. Soni Graphics
Aditi Gajjar Production Coordinator
Manu Joseph Cover Work
Manu Joseph About the Author Eric Tiggeler
is an author of several books on Joomla!, such as the highly successful Joomla!
2.5 Beginner's Guide
. He has written several Dutch Joomla! guides. His book got excellent reader reviews. Eric also writes tutorials for several computer magazines and for the Dutch Joomla! community website. Over the last ten years, Eric has developed numerous websites, big and small—many of them using Joomla! Eric is fascinated by the Web as a powerful, creative, and ever-changing means of communication—and by revolutionary software such as Joomla!, enabling anybody to create beautiful and user-friendly websites. On a daily basis, Eric works as a consultant and copywriter at a communication consultancy company affiliated with the Free University of Amsterdam. Over the last few years, he has written more than twenty Dutch books on writing and communication. His passion is making complex things easy to understand.
Eric Tiggeler is married and has two daughters. He lives and works in Hilversum
www.joomla.erictiggeler.nl
(The Netherlands). On the Web, you'll find him on
Any book is a team effort, so I'd like to thank everyone at Packt for their encouraging commitment to this project. Thanks also to the reviewers—for testing the alpha version of this book and helping me create a thoroughly reliable final release!
About the Revi ewers Peter Martin has a keen interest in computers, programming, sharing knowledge,
and how people use information technology. He has a bachelor's degree in Economics (International Marketing Management) and a master's degree in Mass Communication. He discovered PHP/MySQL in 2003 and Joomla's predecessor, Mambo CMS, a year later.
www.db8.nl
Peter has his own business (founded in 2005) and he supports companies and organizations with Joomla implementations, support, and Joomla extension development. Peter is actively involved in the Joomla community where he is a member of the Community Leadership Team and Global Moderator at the Joomla forum. Furthermore, Peter has reviewed the following Packt Publishing books:
Joomla! Search Engine Optimization by Ric Shreves
Joomla! 2.5 Beginner's Guide
by Eric Tiggeler
Joomla! 1.6 First Look
by Eric Tiggeler
Joomla! 1.5 Templates Cookbook
by Richard Carter His other interests are open source software, Linux (Debian, Arch Linux), Raspberry Pi, music (collecting vinyl records), art house movies, and trivia. Peter lives in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. works for a company based in Nepal as a Director of Technology and
Sanjeev Shrestha Innovation. He started his career as a web developer using PHP, MySQL nearly 10 years ago.
Sanjeev holds a Engineering degree in IT from Pokhara University, Nepal. His main interests are web development, Linux administration, Cloud Computing and distributed systems. He is an avid Joomla! lover and has been working with Joomla! since 2007. He has developed numerous popular Joomla extensions. He loves open source and leaves no stone unturned to promote open source technologies in the local market. He is a proud founding member of PHP Developers Nepal and MongoDB users Nepal which promotes knowledge sharing among the developers.
I would like to thank my family and friends who let me sit alone for hours to read the book and review. I would also like to thank Packt Publishing for providing me with this opportunity to review the book.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites
About the example site
14
Installing Joomla in four steps
22 Time for action – downloading the Joomla files
23
Time for action – running the Joomla installation wizard
28
Table of Contents
Chapter 3: First Steps: Getting to Know Joomla
Introducing frontend and backend – the Joomla interface
44
And what's the frontend?
46 Exploring the frontend – the website as the user sees it
46 Time for action – tour the example site
48 Exploring the example content
51
Taking a closer look at the Control Panel
54 Top menu (1)
54
Understanding backend tools and controls
56 Getting your feet wet – start administering your site
58 Three types of backend tasks
58 Content management example – let's create some content!
58 Time for action – publishing your first article
59 Extension management example – adding a module
60 Time for action – adding a module to the site
61 Site management example – configuring basic site settings
64 Time for action – setting Joomla preferences
64
What you will be making
68
Step 1: Removing sample content
70 Time for action – deleting articles and categories
70 Step 2: Deleting menus and other modules
73 Time for action – deleting menus
73 Building your new site in three steps
75
Time for action – preparing a new logo image
[ ]
77
Table of Contents [
]
Time for action – assigning articles to the home page 102
129
Refining your site structure
In what case do you need more subcategory levels? 122
Transferring your site map to Joomla 118
114
Time for action – create a future-proof site map 115
Grouping content – a crash course in site organization 114
Designing a site map
110
Time for action – changing the site configuration 110
108
Time for action – creating a message block 108
Wrapping up: Changing site settings
Time for action – creating a Contact Form menu link 106
Adding a special message blockTime for action – creating a contact 105
Add a contact form 105
94
92 Creating menu links to the new content
Now that's the all-important power of menus
85
85 Time for action – creating an article
84 Creating articles and using the Images and Links fields
Time for action – creating a News category
82
CSS stylesheets? Come again?
Chapter 5: Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing your Content Effectively 113 Building on the example site
Table of Contents [
]
Time for action – move content from one category to another 129
Renaming categories 131 Time for action – rename a category 131
How do you go about building a small site? 138
Chapter 6: Creating Killer Content: Adding and Editing Articles 143 Articles and content pages, what's the difference? 144 Creating and editing articles: beyond the basics 144 Making your words look good: formatting article text 146 Time for action – add styling to article text 147 Adding images to articles
150 Time for action – uploading images 151
Time for action – inserting and aligning images 152
Time for action – creating an intro text 158
Creating multipage articles 159
Time for action – using page breaks to split up an article 160
The Article Options tab 168
The Articles tab 171 The Editing Layout tab 171
The Permissions tab 173
Archiving articles 173
Time for action – creating a news archive 174
Table of Contents
Chapt
Why do you need overview pages, anyway? 180
Creating the perfect home – mastering home page layout 182
Changing the way the home page is arranged 183
Time for action – rearranging the layout of articles on the home page 183
Controlling the order of home page items manually 187
Setting a criteria to automatically order home page items 188
Time for action – show the most recent items first 188
Creating more than one page containing featured articles 197
Another type of home page: using a single article 198
Time for action – creating a different home page 198
Showing full articles on a category overview page 206
The second type of overview page – Lists 208
Time for action – add a link to a Category List layout 209
Customizing lists: Exploring Category List options 211 Category Options
211 List Layouts 211
Chapt
How many menus can you have? 216
Creating user-friendly navigation: cleaning up the Main Menu 217
Option 1: changing the order of menu items 217
Time for action – changing menu item order 218
Option 2: creating submenu items219
Time for action – creating a secondary menu item 219
Time for action – moving hyperlinks to the new menu 224
Time for action – telling Joomla where to display the menu 226
Using the horizontal drop-down menu as the main menu 228
Time for action: displaying Main Menu links in the Top Menu 229
Creating split submenus
[ ]
231Table of Contents [
]
Exploring menu module settings 234
Switching to the menu module screen 235
What types of menu links are available? 239
Creating plain text links 242 Time for action – creating text links 242
Chapter 9: Opening Up the Site: Enabling Users to Log In and Contribute 247 What are the default user groups and their permissions? 248 Public and Guest users – the site visitors 249 Registered users – the user group that can log in 250 Author, Editor, and Publisher – the frontend content contributors 250 Manager, Administrator, Super User – the backend content contributors
Enabling users to log in and contribute content 252
Time for action – adding a user with frontend authoring permissions 253
Enabling content contributors to log in to the frontend 255
Time for action – put a Login Form on the home page 255
Time for action – logging in as a frontend content contributor 256
Reviewing and publishing team content submissions 258
Time for action – reviewing and publishing submitted content 259
Find out what editors and publishers can do 261 Finding out what backend users can doShop Suppliers and Customers – two example user groups 252
How do you enable users to create their own account? 263 Displaying a Login menu link
264
Time for action – register yourself and log in 264
Hiding content for non-registered users 266
Time for action – hiding content from non-registered users 266
Getting your visitors to "register to read more" 268
Time for action – partially hiding content from non-registered users 268
Time for action: Step 1 – create a user group 274
Time for action: Step 2 – tell Joomla what the group can see 274
Time for action: Step 3 – Tell Joomla what the group can do 276
Time for action: Step 4 – adding users to the new group 278
262
Enabling self-registration – allowing visitors to register 263
Table of Contents
Chapt
Time for action – adding a series of contacts 292
Trying out an alternative newsflash module 297
Time for action – downloading and installing an extension 297
Time for action – putting the extension to work 298
Showing images in a lightbox gallery 302
Time for action – create an image gallery 303
Do you want more from your photo gallery? 305Using extensions to enhance your work space 305
Time for action – replace Joomla's default text editor 306
So much more to explore 310
Managing the site language 311
Changing default text strings 312
Time for action – removing or replacing default texts 312
Using the Language Manager to create multilingual sites 314 Updating extensions314
Chapt
And this is why templates are so much fun 318
Changing the settings of the current template 320
What are Template Styles?320 Customizing the current template using built-in options 321
Time for action – changing the site color and layout options 321
Changing to a different template324 Previewing available templates
326 Setting a different template as the default 327
[ ]
Table of Contents [ ]
Time for action – activating a different template 327
Applying Template Styles to individual pages 329
Time for action – creating a Template Style for one specific page 329
Downloading and installing a new template 331
Time for action – downloading and activating a new template 332
Time for action – adding the logo file334
Time for action – adding a menu module 334
Time for action – placing modules in new template positions 337
Analyzing Joomla CSS using web developer tools 344
Chapter 12: Attracting Search Engine Traffic: SEO Tips and Techniques 353 Why do you need to accommodate for search engines? 354 Optimizing articles for findability
1. The article title – make it meaningful 355
2. The article structure – use clear formatting 355 Optimizing the use of H1 headings
354
Configuring HTML page titles
359
Time for action – setting the HTML page title 359
Adding the Site Name to the page title 360 Adding meaningful metadata
361
Time for action – personalize the site metadata 362
Using search engine friendly URLs 364
Creating an automatically generated list of hyperlinks 366
Time for action – adding a list of links to popular articles 366
Redirecting visitors to pages that have been moved 368
357
Table of Contents [
]
7. Enabling the visitor to select a language 387
Read the step-by-step tutorial on multilingual sites 387
Appendix C:
Time for action – creating page redirects 368
Creating a Backup with Akeeba Backup 379 Restoring a backup 381
Tip 7: Have a backup ready 379
Setting File Permissions 377
374
Appendix A:
Tip 1: Download from reliable sources 374
Tip 2: Update regularly
Preface
Joomla is one of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. It's a free, fun, and feature- rich tool for anyone who wants to create dynamic, interactive websites. Even beginners can deploy Joomla to build professional websites, although it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build the site that completely meets your needs. This book will help you to start building websites with Joomla quickly, learning step-by-step to get the most out of its advanced features.
What thi s book covers
Chapter 1, Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites, in this chapter you'll
learn why you want to use Joomla to create an advanced, cool-looking site that's easy to expand, customize, and maintain.
Chapter 2, Installation: Getting Joomla Up and Running, helps you learn how to install Joomla on your own computer or on a web server, and how to create a sample site. Chapter 3, First Steps: Getting to Know Joomla, here, you'll get familiar with the basic
concepts of Joomla, the administrative interface, and the principles of a website constructed out of 'building blocks'.
Chapter 4, Web Building Basics: Creating a Site in an Hour, here, you'll face a real-life
challenge of using Joomla to build a basic but expandable website fast. You'll customize Joomla's default sample site to fit your needs, adding content, menu links, and change the site's look and feel.
Preface
Chapter 5, Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing your Content Effectively, makes it easy to add and
find information on your site by designing a clear, expandable, and manageable structure for your content.
Chapter 6, Creating Killer Content: Adding and Editing Articles, will teach you to create content
pages that are attractive and easy to read, and you'll learn about different ways to add images and to to tweak the page layout.
Chapter 7, Welcoming Your Visitors: Creating Attractive Home Pages and Overview Pages,
here, you'll create a home page and overview pages to entice visitors to actually read all your valuable content.
Chapter 8, Helping Your Visitors Find What They Want: Managing Menus, will teach you how
you can help the visitor to find what they want easily by designing clear and easy navigation through menus.
Chapter 9, Opening Up the Site: Enabling Users to Log In and Contribute, shows how to enable users to log in and allow them to create content and manage the website. Chapter 10, Getting the Most out of Your Site: Extending Joomla, teaches you on how to
extend Joomla's capabilities using all sorts of extensions—using an image gallery to attractively display pictures, automatically showing article teasers on the home page, or enhancing your workspace by installing an easier content editor.
Chapter 11, Creating an Attractive Design: Working with Templates, explains how templates
will give your site a fresh look and feel, and make it easy to create an individual look, different from a "typical" Joomla site. You'll also learn to install and customize templates.
Chapter 12, Attracting Search Engine Traffic: SEO Tips and Techniques, will show you how to
increase your site's visibility for search engines by applying Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, such as creating friendly URLs.
Appendix A, Keeping the Site Secure, will show you some simple, common-sense steps you can take to keep your site safe from hackers or data loss.
Appendix B, Creating a Multilingual Site, here, you'll find a walkthrough of the steps involved
in creating a bilingual website, using the multilingual capabilities built into Joomla.Appendix C, Pop Quiz Answers, contains answers to the multiple choice pop quizzes you will
find throughout the book.Preface What you need for this book To follow the tutorials and exercises in this book, you'll need a computer with Internet access.
It's recommended to have a web hosting account so that you can install Joomla online.
Who this book is for
The Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide is aimed at anyone who wants to build and maintain a great website and get the most out of Joomla. It helps you build on the skills and knowledge you may already have of creating websites—but if you're new to this subject, you won't have any difficulty understanding the instructions. Of course, we'll touch upon basic terms and concepts (such as HTML and CSS), but if you're not familiar with these, you'll also find references to some web resources.
Conventi ons In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
Time for action – heading 1.
Action 1 2. Action 2 3. Action 3
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
What j ust happened? This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
Preface
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
Pop quiz – heading These are short multiple-choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.
Have a go hero – heading
These are practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned. You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
width and height
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Change the values to reflect the size of the new image. To shift the image a little to the left-hand side, decrease the
margin-left
value." A block of code is set as follows:
#logo { float:left; background:#e5e5e5; display:inline-block; padding:0 20px; font-size:18px;}
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
#logo { float:left; background:#e5e5e5; display:inline-block; padding:0 20px; font-size:18px;}
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in
menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "In the Menu Manager: Edit
Menu Item screen, click on the Page Display Options panel name on the right-hand side of
the screen to open this panel."
Preface Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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1 Introducti on: A New and Easy Way to Bui l d Websi tes
You want to build a website. It should look great, and it should be easy to use and maintain. Keeping it up-to-date should be effortless. Changing the appearance of your site should take minutes, not hours. You don't want to manage it all by yourself, but you want to enable other people to log in and write new content without having to understand HTML or other coding languages. And when your site grows, it should be easy to extend it with new functionality—maybe adding a forum, or a newsletter. If that's what you're looking for, welcome to Joomla.
When it comes to creating a great, professional-looking website that's easy to use, you really can't beat the power of a Content Management System (CMS) such as Joomla. Without writing a single line of code, you can create any kind of site, boasting a variety of cool and advanced features.
Joi n the CMS revol uti on
Maybe you have already built websites the traditional way. That basically meant creating HTML documents—web pages—one by one. As the site grew, you'd end up with a bunch of HTML documents, trying to keep all of them organized and making sure all menu links stay up-to-date. You'd probably maintain the site by yourself, because it was hard for other people to find their way around the structure of your particular site, or be proficient in the web editing software you use.
Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites
Enter the Holy Grail of web building: the Content Management System! A CMS is an application that runs on a web server. It allows you to develop and maintain a website online. It comes packed with features, ranging from basic features to add and modify content to advanced functionality such as user registration or site search capability. In short, a CMS makes it possible to build sites that would normally involve a full team of web professionals with a massive amount of time, money, and expertise at their disposal.
All that magic is made possible because a CMS is really an advanced set of scripts (written in a scripting language, such as PHP) that uses a database to store the content of your website. From that database, it retrieves bits and pieces of content and presents them as web pages. This dynamic way of storing and presenting content makes a CMS very flexible. Do you want to show only a selection of articles from a specific category on a page? Do you want to display only the intro texts of the most recent articles on the home page? Do you want to add a list of links to the most popular contents? Do you want to limit access to registered users? It's all possible—just pick the right settings. Additionally, a CMS allows you to integrate all sorts of extra features, such as contact forms, picture galleries, and much more.
The best part is that CMSes like these are yours to download and deploy today. You can pick your CMS of choice from a range of freely available open source products. Your new CMS-powered site can be online tomorrow. Now how's that for a great deal?
What's open source software? The source code of this type of software is "unlocked", unlike software developed commercially. Everyone has access to the Joomla source code and software developers are encouraged to modify and to help improve the software. The name Joomla stands for "all together". It's as much a software product as it is an international community of people working together voluntarily to expand and improve that product. Most open source software is distributed free of charge, as is the case with Joomla. However, some Joomla extensions are commercial—you have to pay for them, but it's still open software (that is, you get access to the source code).
Why woul d you choose Jooml a?
There are many open source CMSes around. They're all great tools, each with its own typical uses and benefits. Why would you want to choose Joomla?
People tend to choose Joomla because they find it easy to use. It has a clear and friendly user interface that keeps on getting better over the years. The redesigned Joomla 3 interface makes it easy to create and publish articles to keep your site current. You can manage content anytime, anywhere, whether you're using a web browser on a PC, a tablet computer, or a smartphone. [ ]
[
]
http://community. joomla.org/showcase
Let's have a look at some great real-world examples of sites built using Joomla. If you're anything like me, seeing inspirational examples is what makes you want to get started right away, creating something equally cool (or preferably something even better). These are just a few examples from the Web and from the Joomla site showcase (
What kind of sites can you build with Joomla?
You don't have to maintain the website all by yourself. Other users can add content, add new menu items, and much more. The numbers seem to indicate that Joomla is the open source CMS of choice for web builders worldwide. It's the engine behind some 20 million websites worldwide and this number is still growing rapidly day by day. It's is one of the biggest open source software projects around, supported by a huge user community and constantly being developed further by an international team of volunteers.
Keeping hyperlinks up-to-date is greatly automated. For example, you can add category overview pages without ever having to manually update them—on a category overview page, Joomla will automatically add links to all new pages you'll put in that category.
It's really easy to add or edit content and to keep it organized (even if there's lots of it). Joomla allows you to categorize content using an unlimited number of multilevel categories.
Adding new features to your site takes just a few clicks. There are thousands of extensions available for Joomla, ranging from menu systems to commenting systems and forums.
Apart from these typical Joomla benefits, it comes with all of the advantages of a state-of-the-art CMS. To name just a few:
It's easier to install the CMS, the HTML output is based upon the latest standards, and dozens of little changes—such as an improved text editor screen for creating content—make the CMS easier to work with and more powerful.
The current Joomla release, version 3, adds many improvements and new features.
It's very easy to change the site's appearance—templates for Joomla are abundant and can be installed within minutes, giving your site a fresh look and feel.
). They are very diverse sites from very different organizations, each with their own goals and target groups. What they have in common is that they deploy Joomla in a way that you could too. They adapt the CMS to their specific needs, making it perfectly suited for the content they present and the impression they want to make.
Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites
Here's an example from the Alliance for Catholic Education in the United States
ace.nd.edu
( ). The home page uses various ways to present highlights from the site's impressive amount of contents.
The following example is a website of a M+H Architects, providing a clear and attractive
mharch.com
overview of their services and projects ( ):
[ ]
Chapter 1 Joomla can handle complex sites with thousands of pages. Here's an illustration of a
content-rich site with a made-to-measure design—the Guggenheim Museum website
guggenheim.org
( ): One final example demonstrates that Joomla sites don't have to look anything like a typical CMS-powered site. You can use quite a different design—and still take advantage of Joomla's default functionality to power the site. This site presents a Dutch events
puurspecialevents.nl
company ( ):
[ ]
Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites
If you're looking for some more inspiration, browse the official Joomla
showcase at http://community.joomla.org/showcase or go to www.bestofjoomla.com and have a look around the Best of Sites section.Learni ng to use Jooml a
It may sound too good to be true. Does Joomla really make creating state-of-the-art websites easy as ABC. Let's be honest—it will make it reasonably easy, but of course it does require you to invest some time and effort. After all, working with Joomla (or any CMS) is very different from building websites the traditional way. You'll notice this as soon as you start installing the system. Compared to setting up a simple static website consisting of a few HTML pages, building a Joomla-powered site takes a bit more preparation. You'll need hosting space that meets specific requirements and you'll need to set up a database. It's very doable, and this book will guide you through the process step by step.
Once you've got Joomla set up, you'll soon get the hang of creating a basic site. The next challenge is to get things just right for your particular goals. After all, you don't want "just any Joomla-powered site"—you want to build a specific site, aimed at your specific target audience. The Joomla Beginner's Guide will help you to go beyond a basic site and make the choices that fit your goals.
Even using a CMS, it will take time and effort to create and maintain great websites. However, Joomla will make it much easier and much more fun for you (and your web team members) to get your site started and keep it evolving.
What you'l l l earn usi ng thi s book
The Joomla Beginner's Guide isn't just about Joomla—it's about making websites, and it shows you how to use Joomla to make the best website you can. After all, if you're interested in all Joomla features and capabilities, you can get a reasonable impression by exploring the interface by yourself and trying out the menus and options. However, even a user-friendly interface doesn't tell you how to deploy it in the best way in real-life circumstances. What's the best and fastest way to get started, what features and options are particularly useful, what are the ones you probably don't have to bother using at all? I want to help you to tame the beast that's called Joomla, to find your own way around and to get things done—with a great-looking, user-friendly website as the output. That's what the Joomla Beginner's Guide is all about.
The Joomla Beginner's Guide is focused on learning by doing—the structure of the book reflects the process of building a website. In the first few chapters, you learn how to install Joomla, take a tour of the system, and get a feel for what it's like. After that, you'll learn all that's needed to build and maintain your own site, such as: [ ]
[ ]
On the Joomla website, two versions are available for download: 2.5 and 3.x. Joomla 2.5 will be supported until 2014. It's still commonly used, especially by experienced web developers, who need a matured CMS and want to be able to choose from thousands of extensions, developed specifically for 2.5. Joomla 3.0 is the first release of the next generation. It's stable and reliable, but the Joomla developers will keep on improving it until the new long-term release, 3.5, is finished. When you start using Joomla now, your best choice is version 3; you'll benefit from the latest improvements and features straight away, and the number of extensions you can choose from is growing rapidly, day by day.
What's the current version of Joomla?
Feel free to skip chapters! Don't worry, to learn using Joomla you don't have to follow all the book chapters and the exercises in them step by step. After you've gone through the introductory chapters, maybe you feel comfortable to skip to changing the design of your site or adding extensions. That's okay—you can jump straight into most of the further chapters and follow the exercises there as long as you have a working version of Joomla and some dummy content available.
how to tweak the site to attract search engine traffic and to keep the site safe
change the site layout and make it more attractive
extend Joomla's capabilities and add special features (such as a picture gallery) to the site
mastering the fundamentals by creating a basic website in one hour
how to engage your web visitors and turn them into active users who can register and add content